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A fact from Comparative illusion appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 17 December 2018 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Escher sentences such as "More people have been to Russia than I have" may initially be perceived as meaningful despite being ungrammatical nonsense?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2018/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Comparative illusion.

Wikipedia

Other refs

These are refs which discuss the phenomenon briefly. They might be useful the history of interest in this phenomenon, an overview of people's analyses of the phenomenon, explanations why people care about this, etc, but probably shouldn't be added to the Further Reading section. If they don't use the standard Russia or Berlin sentence I'm noting their example as well to make it easier to find other sources which cite their examples and hence which might be relevent.

Fitzgerald, Gareth (2010). "Linguistic Intuitions". The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 61 (1): 123–160 [139]. doi:10.1093/bjps/axp014. Many more people have been to France than I have.
Hinzen, Wolfram (2006). "Prior to Function". Mind Design and Minimal Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 117–149 [131]. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199289257.001.0001/acprof-9780199289257-chapter-4. ISBN 978-0-19-928925-7. More people have read books by Marquez than I have.
Myers, James (2009). "Syntactic Judgment Experiments". Language and Linguistics Compass. 3 (1): 406–423 [412]. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00113.x.
Saddy, Douglas; Uriagereka, Juan (2004). "Measuring Language". International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos. 14 (2): 383–404 [384]. doi:10.1142/S0218127404009296. More people have visited Berlin than I have.
Schütze, Carson T. (2011). "Linguistic evidence and grammatical theory". Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science. 2 (2): 206–221 [212]. doi:10.1002/wcs.102.
Smith, Neil (2005). "Introduction: What Everyone Should Know about Language and Linguistics". Language, Frogs and Savants: More Linguistic Problems, Puzzles and Polemics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 1–36 [10]. doi:10.1002/9780470775059.ch. ISBN 978-1-4051-3037-0. More people have visited Moscow than I have.
Sprouse, Jon (2011). "A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory". Behavior Research Methods. 43 (1): 155–167 [158]. doi:10.3758/s13428-010-0039-7.

Umimmak (talk) 09:20, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Another ref I ended up not using:

Barrios, Edison (2012). "Linguistic Knowledge and Cognitive Integration". Crítica, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía. 44 (130): 35–67. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Umimmak (talk) 22:34, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

And: Nussbaum, Miriam Claire. Subset comparatives as comparative quantifiers (MS). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. hdl:1721.1/113771.

Umimmak (talk) 23:30, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Correct 'form' of the sentence.

So, what is the correct form/wording of the example sentence mentioned in the first paragraph?

It should be given right after, or as part of, the sentence that mentions a "bare plural" in the following paragraph.

Just a thought. 2600:8800:784:8F00:C23F:D5FF:FEC4:D51D (talk) 00:39, 17 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What do you mean? There is no "correct" form because the sentence is meaningless. And if you ask people what their initial thoughts are on what it means they might say different things, each of which would correspond to a different sentence. Umimmak (talk) 09:26, 17 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

More linguists understand this sentence than I do.

I'm a linguist myself, but I don't get this at all. The sentence "More people have been to Russia than I have" seems perfectly grammatical and logical to me. (If I'm being picky I might shorten it to "More people have been to Russia than I"). If at least two people have been to Russia, then the sentence is true. End of. No?

Sorry if I'm showing my limited intelligence here, but I don't see the problem. Can someone help? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.92.153.10 (talk) 09:28, 17 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If you undo the VP-ellipsis in the second clause you get: "More people have been to Russia than I have ~~been to Russia~~". Note that doesn't say "More people have been to Russia than (just) me", which would be an additive reading not a comparative reading. You can't compare how many people have been to Russia to *how many I have been to Russia. The effect should still work with "Fewer people have been to Russia than I have", which avoids the ambiguity "more" can have. Umimmak (talk) 01:12, 18 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! That's very clear. Makes me wonder how many ungrammatical sentences we utter/parse every day without problems. Also, I wonder what Michael Halliday would have to say about it? Just wondering out loud - that's not a real question I'm expecting an answer to. 93.92.153.10 (talk) 09:42, 27 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

example A

The example in the history section "In Michigan and Minnesota.." seems misplaced. Following the source, it seems people (myself included) easily and instinctively arrive at a single meaning. The intended meaning is not considered ambiguous, the question is how people are processing the sentence.73.192.36.165 (talk) 17:53, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 46: / Line 46: @@
 ::Thanks! That's very clear. Makes me wonder how many ungrammatical sentences we utter/parse every day without problems. Also, I wonder what Michael Halliday would have to say about it? Just wondering out loud - that's not a real question I'm expecting an answer to. [[Special:Contributions/93.92.153.10|93.92.153.10]] ([[User talk:93.92.153.10|talk]]) 09:42, 27 December 2018 (UTC)
+== example A ==
+The example in the history section "In Michigan and Minnesota.." seems misplaced. Following the source, it seems people (myself included) easily and instinctively arrive at a single meaning. The intended meaning is not considered ambiguous, the question is ''how'' people are processing the sentence.[[Special:Contributions/73.192.36.165|73.192.36.165]] ([[User talk:73.192.36.165|talk]]) 17:53, 8 February 2021 (UTC)